2018 in review

It was a great year, let’s take a look at the main high­light­s.

Ear­ly in Jan­uary, I pre­sent­ed a talk at a lo­cal mee­tup, which had a good re­cep­tion amongst the au­di­ence. The fist part of the year was a great pe­ri­od for learn­ing more about dis­trib­uted sys­tem­s, event sourcing, and even­t-­driv­en ar­chi­tec­tures. The peak of which was at­tend­ing the Kaf­ka sum­mit in Lon­don.

By late Au­gust/ear­ly Sep­tem­ber I fin­ished my book Clean code in Python which was a quite chal­leng­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.

It was a great plea­sure to at­tend the Python San Se­bastián con­fer­ence. I’ve heard about this con­fer­ence in a light­ning talk in Eu­roPy­thon, and I was cu­ri­ous about it. It was good to meet a group of friend­ly new peo­ple, and hav­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to present there (an en­hanced ver­sion of the talk pre­sent­ed at the meet­up in Jan­uary). Be­sides, the city is amaz­ing, so it’s cer­tain­ly some­thing to re­peat!

Be­sides some im­prove­ments in my con­fig­u­ra­tion files (vim and dot files), and to some of my oth­er pub­lic repos­i­to­ries, there was­n’t that much room for open source con­tri­bu­tion­s. On the oth­er hand, there was a good deal of learn­ing: I’ve read some fan­tas­tic books about soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing (such as Facts and fal­la­cies of soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing, Ob­jec­t-ori­ent­ed soft­ware con­struc­tion, and more), which un­for­tu­nate­ly I was­n’t able to cov­er in blog posts (but maybe in the fu­ture I will), and I suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed the ma­chine learn­ing course of­fered by Cours­era, which was amaz­ing. Again, maybe in a fu­ture post I will be able to prop­er­ly re­view it, but for now I can just tell you that is high­ly rec­om­mend­able, if you’re look­ing for­ward to learn a ton and at the same time have fun solv­ing pro­gram­ming as­sign­ments.

All in al­l, it was a year with a lot of pos­i­tive notes. Look­ing for­ward to an amaz­ing 2019 for ev­ery­one!